Gracie tipped the jar toward me. “Try some, baker.” The gesture was solicitous, but her eyes glinted challenge. In every legend of the underworld, there is the same warning: Don’t eat the food. Not before you know what’s happening and/or what bargain you’re accepting. Along the length of the table, wide dishes bobbed up and down, orbiting on curren

“Everything’s radioactive. It’s fine. Mutation’s a good thing.” I had no idea if he was serious or not. He seemed like the kind of person who cultivated that ambiguity—who reveled in it. Generally I don’t enjoy those kinds of people.

Beoreg returned a moment later dragging an enormous wooden trunk, scarred and stickered, something from another era of travel. He unhooked its clasps and threw back the lid; inside, arrayed in a jumble, were all the accoutrements of a kitchen. There were small long-handled cups and broad, flat pans. I saw a thick clutch of wooden spoons, their edge

The house was large and deeply lived-in, all the shelves and surfaces stacked with books and boxes, framed pictures, old greeting cards set up like tent cities. If there was a spectrum of spaces defined at one end by my barren apartment, this marked the other extreme. Every single surface told a story. A long one. With digressions.

“What’s it supposed to taste like?” Jaina Mitra’s gaze sharpened. “Nothing. It’s not intended to be a simulation. I think food should taste like what it is, don’t you? And what this is, is a super-nutritious cellulosic suspension manufactured in situ by a community of microbes.”

In a prime spot just across the yellow-tape road from the lemon trees, he tended his own dark grove of bookshelves, and beside them a field of legal boxes, which held thousands of menus from restaurants famous and obscure. Whenever I passed Horace’s collection, there was someone flipping through the menus with the furious intensity of a DJ digging

Clingstone’s gaze turned inward, and more gently she said, “It never occurs to people that maybe I’d like to be the reckless one. The disrupter! As the years have passed, I have discovered in myself this . . . energy. Is it anger? A touch of spite? I’m not sure.” She looked back toward the restaurant. The beans on their strings were rippling on a b

IT’S ALWAYS NEW AND ASTONISHING when it’s yours. Infatuation; sex; card tricks. How many humans have baked how many loaves of bread, across how many centuries? I’m sure Beoreg baked calmly, matter-of-factly, without paroxysms of cosmic delight. But that didn’t matter. For me, the novice, the miracle was intact, and I felt compelled by some force—ne

We passed a shelf where a wheel of cheese had exploded into some kind of fungal overgrowth. Tall, mushroom-like fruiting bodies rose up and swayed slightly in the air disturbed by our passage. I sucked in a sharp breath. “Is that . . . there . . .” I pointed. “Is that all right?” Agrippa nodded. “Oh, it’s fantastic. An empire is rising, lifting up